Most commercial enterprises require, and are, in some way, affected by the software employed in its business processes. Accordingly, software metrics is a huge field in software engineering. Software metrics can provide a quantitative and qualitative basis for the development and validation of software models.
As different models evolve in the industry, each can provide benefits in some areas and shortcomings in other areas. More recently, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) schema models have been favored for use in many areas. Schemas can be used as interface definitions, protocol specifications and data models, just to name a few. Accordingly, schema analysis is a key ingredient of an emerging engineering discipline for schemaware (e.g., XML), schema-based data management, schema-aware programming (e.g., XML), and more generally, software development that includes schema artifacts.
Schema analysis aims to extract this quantitative and qualitative information from the actual schema models. To this end, schemas are measured through systematic algorithms, on the basis of the intrinsic feature model of the XSD (XML schema definition) language. XML schema analysis is a derivative of software analysis (program analysis) and of software code metrics, in particular. However, there is little or no work, whatsoever, being done on XML schema metrics. Moreover, given the widespread adoption of XML schema and the current investments by XML technology providers into XML schema design tools, such metrics can form an important aspect for schema development.